Alexandra Oliver delves into suburbia's darkness in the poetry collection Hail, the Invisible Watchman
Tabassum Siddiqui | | Posted: June 7, 2022 12:07 PM | Last Updated: June 7, 2022
'If the poems have that rattle of urgency, they will come to you'
Vancouver-born, Ontario-based poet Alexandra Oliver's new collection of poetry, Hail, the Invisible Watchman, draws on her characteristic use of formal structure and metre to examine the haunted aspects of suburbia, finding the darkness behind small-town facades.
Oliver, who recently completed a PhD in English and Cultural Studies from McMaster University, is the author of two previous collections — Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway, which won the 2014 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and 2016's Let the Empire Down.
She is a past co-editor of Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters, as well as of the formalist journal The Rotary Dial.
Oliver, who got her start as a slam poet in the 1990s, has performed her work for CBC Radio and NPR, as well as at the National Poetry Slam and many festivals and conferences.
Written in the midst of Oliver's PhD work and the pandemic, Hail, the Invisible Watchman is split into three sections: the first a series of narrative poems revealing the unsettling realities of a suburban neighbourhood; the second sketching out a family tragedy from the perspectives of various characters; and the third a group of sonnets that offer a re-evaluation of the contentious 1947 novella Hetty Dorval by the late Canadian writer Ethel Wilson.
Oliver spoke with CBC Books about juggling creative work with academia, interrogating the discrepancies of suburban life, and balancing gloom with levity in Hail, the Invisible Watchman.
Everyday horrors
"I started writing this book right around the end of 2019, but it started to pick up steam around when the pandemic hit. At the beginning, I just had a bunch of poems — for example, the suite of poems about Hetty Dorval, which is a really misunderstood Canadian novella. It's so filled with weird resonances about coercion, and being manipulated by parental and colonial forces.
"But the pandemic really, really affected me. Where I live, in Burlington, Ont., at the beginning there was this outpouring of 'We're going to do it' enthusiasm, and people were banging pots for the health-care workers and buying groceries for others — and then it just dried up and stopped. I began to notice that people's worst instincts were coming to the fore, and that people were becoming more intolerant, more suspicious.
I began thinking about the idea of a watchman, the idea of these forces that watch us — everything from social media to negative parental forces, to those worst impulses that people capitulate to.
"And so I began thinking about the idea of a watchman, the idea of these forces that watch us — everything from social media to negative parental forces, to those worst impulses that people capitulate to. I lost probably four friends during the pandemic — not to the illness itself, but to really strange reactionary beliefs. And you just think, it's like that movie — it's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
"And as I was writing, I thought, this book has to be a kind of horror movie. It has to have that spirit of, 'Here is an ordinary place, or set of ordinary places, and here are these forces that converge on these places' — and also this very Cronenbergian idea of the body containing its own watchmen, its worst impulse."
Into the archives
"In the town where I live — we're all living on stolen land, right? — but there's this idea of, 'This is our town and this is what we're like — this is tradition.' At my gym, they had the local cable TV station playing all the time, and there would be this stuff that was all about religious freedom, tradition and community. And there were these weird sort of heteronormative principles, and I just began to think to myself, 'Oh, this place is haunted — number one, we are haunting this place because we are on this land that is not our own. But on the other hand, things are haunting us.'
"That's what became a part of the book's creation, and also its darkness. I began to think about the legacy of families. The book is not strictly autobiographical, but it has elements in it that were taken from my life, and also the lives of people that I know. Actress Ellen Burstyn used to say that whenever she got a role, she would take the elevator down into the archives of her memory. I love that image. So that's what I did — I took the elevator down into the archives.
"I wanted to explore darkness in families, and trauma, and issues of addiction and cycles of unkindness and miscomprehension. And so being at home during the pandemic became sort of the right time to look into these things. But at the same time, I really hope I'm not a Debbie Downer. [laughs] I wanted there to be some elements of gallows humor. It was hard to balance those elements, but I hope I did."
A fine balance
"I remember once telling a professor that I was writing a new book of poems, and she said, 'Don't you think you should be focusing on real work?' But you know, [writing and academics] really do feed off each other. I was a mature student, and I have a family. So you've got all the home things, and then you've got the dissertation and courses and extraneous department things. So if you're organizing things in the department, or you're doing a teaching fellowship or are a teaching assistant, you've got all these moving parts. But the good news/bad news is that the poems come for you regardless, right? The poem kind of knocks on the door.
If the poems have that rattle of urgency, they will come to you — they will approach you, and they must be listened to.
"It is a major juggling act. But if the poems have that rattle of urgency, they will come to you — they will approach you, and they must be listened to. Also because I was writing my dissertation about how poetry is metrically structured, I found that one thing fed off the other. And I think both projects turned out to have different dimensions because there was a symbiotic relationship."
Finding the form
"I write in form because I grew up in a really sort of eccentric family — a family with older parents, where there was a kind of code that you had to use to interact with people; there was a decorum. And it was like living in some 1920s German novel — there was a way that you did and said things. And so form has always permeated my work. When I was a slam poet, I used form because it helped me remember three-minute chunks of text.
"And for me, it's also a way of dealing with potentially inflammatory subjects. I have elements of the biographical and I deal with my traumas and the things that haunt me, but I'm not the kind of person where I'm going to write a confessional text, so I have to find a way of codifying it. And using these forms allows me to create resonances of tension between the way the poems are structured and how they emerge.
Sometimes [a poem] is like a block of marble and you go in and chip into it, and you shape it into something completely different.
"And how do I choose the form? Sometimes I'll sit down and say, 'Okay, I'm gonna give myself a puzzle — I'm going to try a sestina with this idea.' And sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't — sometimes a line comes to you, so you take that line and then you model the poem around that. Sometimes it's like a block of marble and you go in and chip into it, and you shape it into something completely different. But I think it allows for musicality and pleasure and some kind of intrigue — in the best case, the reader can feel a vibration."
Suburban gothic
"l like cities. I like busyness and parties and events and people. I'm kind of an introvert, but I also enjoy diversity and being in huge groups of people, seeing what's going on. We moved to Burlington, Ont., when my son was two and a half, and there are all these elements that I hadn't lived amongst — like an evangelical Christian element, and there was this sort of sublimated racism and xenophobia. There are elements that are shifting and there's a lot about where I live that I like, but there was always this idea of suburbia being this infinitely creepy place.
I began to think about suburbia as a site for examining things like cruelty, loneliness, alienation — but also moments of love and rapprochement.
"I really like watching films and reading books about suburbia. It's this idea that you're living in this place that's supposed to be perfect, and you're supposed to be in harmony with your neighbours. But there's this fermenting tension, and this terrible loneliness.
"So I began to think about suburbia as a site for examining things like cruelty, loneliness, alienation — but also moments of love and rapprochement."
Alexandra Oliver's comments have been edited for length and clarity.